Curated category
Fusional languages
- Irish languageIrish, known in the language itself as Gaeilge, is a Celtic tongue indigenous to the island of Ireland, and it carries within it a written record stretching…
- Danish languageDanish is a North Germanic language spoken by about 5.5 million people, principally in and around Denmark. It descends from the same ancient source as…
- Norwegian languageNorwegian carries two official written forms at once, a situation found in almost no other country. Bokmål, meaning 'book tongue,' and Nynorsk, meaning 'new…
- German languageGerman, or Deutsch, is a West Germanic language with nearly 100 million native speakers and over 130 million total speakers as of 2024.
- Italian languageItalian almost did not exist as a spoken language. In 1861, when Italy unified, the linguist Tullio De Mauro estimated that only 2.5% of the population could…
- Portuguese languagePortuguese carries roughly 267 million native speakers, making it the fifth-most spoken native language on earth and the most widely spoken language anywhere…
- French languageFrench is a Romance language with about 310 million speakers, of which roughly 74 million are native speakers. It is an official language in 26 countries and…
- Slavic languagesThe Slavic languages are spoken by roughly 315 million people, making the Slavic-speaking world the largest ethno-linguistic group in Europe.
- HindiHindi is the fourth-most-spoken first language in the world, trailing only Mandarin, Spanish, and English. Count it together with its mirror twin Urdu, and…
- Spanish languageSpanish, called español or castellano, is spoken today by about 519 million people as a native language and roughly 636 million in total.
- ArabicArabic is a Central Semitic language of the Afroasiatic family, and roughly 380 million people speak it. That figure makes it the fifth-most spoken language…
- LatinLatin, known to its speakers as lingua Latina, has been declared dead for centuries. Yet right now, in Vatican City, an automated teller machine dispenses…
- English languageEnglish began as the speech of the Angles, one of the Germanic peoples who crossed into Britain after Roman rule collapsed.
- Coptic languageCoptic is a language that has not been spoken natively for centuries, yet it is heard in churches every single week. It is the final form of Egyptian, the…
- Greek languageGreek has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records.